Understanding where you are right now is as important as identifying where you are going.  When planning your change management maturity journey, recognizing your organization’s change management strengths and weaknesses will give you solid grounding to move forward.  This understanding allows you to map out what you need to tackle to increase your organization’s ability to deliver consistent, successful change.

Identifying the steps in your ECM journey

We spoke last week about Enterprise Change Management and the benefits an ECM approach brings to an organization.  One question we are often asked by new clients is how they can identify the steps they need to take to achieve ECM, and build this into a maturity roadmap. 

Every organization is different, and every organization will find their change capability is stronger in some areas than in others.  The first step to building your change capability roadmap is to undertake a gap analysis and get a true picture of where you are today.

A proper gap analysis consists of 3 steps:

1. Assess your organization’s current maturity level to determine the gap you need to close before achieving Enterprise Change Management
2. Understand what change management frameworks and processes already exist inside the organization
3. Assess how change implementation has taken place in the past – key successes and failures in the way change management processes have been applied.

While it might be tempting to take a change management maturity model, read the descriptions and plot yourself against it, we recommend taking a slightly more structured and unbiased approach to your maturity assessment. 

Using the Change Maturity Assessment for your current state analysis

The Change Maturity Assessment provides you with a current state analysis which will help guide your decisions about what is required to develop and mature your change capability.

The current state assessment, shown as a checklist below, is based on choosing between two equally important statements.  Some choices may be difficult and other choices may be ones which individuals would rather not make.

This simulates, to a certain extent, ‘real work’ situations where, during the disruption associated with change, we are faced with difficult choices.   This scoring, using forced choice questions and responses, is what is known as an ipsativ assessment. 

The assessment answers are translated into a profile of the organization’s current change maturity level using the grid and graph below.

Using your assessment results to plan your enterprise change management roadmap

With an objective view of where your organization sits on the change management maturity spectrum, you can now start to plan how to fill the gaps between your current state and your future maturity goals.

While achieving ECM should be your ultimate goal, it is important to use your maturity assessment to take a realistic view on what will be achievable in the short, medium and long term; and build your roadmap appropriately.  Organizations with a change management maturity level 0 or level 1 will not be able to jump and become a level 3 or 4 organization overnight.   

Developing your change capability is a change project in itself, and should be approached as such.  With this in mind, your change capability roadmap should include these 4 elements:

• Designing an integrated change management framework that can be applied across the organization, and to different types of change initiatives
• Creating a change project charter, with a purpose statement, clear goals, measure and an effective leadership network to support ECM as a project
• Providing a platform which will be the point of access of ECM resources; such as training, tools, planning templates etc.
• Deciding on the mix of digital and face-to-face resources required, plus the pilot initiatives that would be the first to apply the new ECM framework. 

Find out more about assessing your change management capability maturity at the end of our white paper ECM: Deploy Long Term, Stay Agile and in our book Enterprise Change Management.  

Download chapter 1 of Enterprise Change Management for free 

Join us next week as we discuss the best approach to deploying your Enterprise Change Management roadmap.

Assess your change management maturity with Roadmap Pro

Whatever your organizations change maturity, our change management platform - Roadmap Pro - will help you identify your organization’s change maturity through a variety of diagnostic tools, assessments and reporting capabilities, allowing you to increase your ability to deliver consistent, successful change.